ABSTRACT
In this, the final chapter of my study, I turn my attention to the response that Cahiers du cinéma critics have had to various forms of “new” media (television, advertising, digital imagery, etc.). Whether it was the collective analysis of the talk show “À armes égales” as a product of the “televisual state apparatus” by Cahiers in 1972, Serge Daney’s notion of “the visual” in his writings for Libération in the 1980s, Jacques Aumont’s wry polemics around the state of contemporary media culture in the twenty-first century, or Jean-Louis Comolli’s incendiary counterposition of “cinema” and “spectacle” in his recent texts, these critics have attempted to grapple with a situation in which the cinema has an increasingly marginalized position within the broader realm of visual imagery. But they do so by drawing on the same fundamental set of ideas that guided their film criticism: a distinctive blend of apparatus theory and Bazinian realism.
